How to disable the Bitcoin network with a botnet

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3 points·pbear2k23··10 comments

This runs some threads each of which connects to bitcoin full nodes from which they repeatedly request the range of 1999 headers from block 783569 [0] through block 785568 [1].

[0] https://blockstream.info/block/0000000000000000000287c1bdbfe...

[1] https://blockstream.info/block/0000000000000000000419a8efe1e...

> i have decapitated bitcoin.

Unless you've proven this out by running it against real Bitcoin nodes, you haven't done anything.

This would be easy for you to test, even on a test net.

Can anyone weigh in on this? I don't know enough about bitcoin to know how much of a threat this is. Would this also be applicable to ETH?

Ethereum is a completely separate codebase that won't have the same bugs as Bitcoin (it will have different bugs). The many Bitcoin forks might be vulnerable to this though.

they are

i found the "exploit"

it's pretty frightening how simple/easy this is

happy to answer questions and/or have this claim disproven

wouldn't whoever ran this "exploit" also have to pay their share of upload/data charges?

well - botnet operators don't care - and download is cheaper than upload

Is there any way to detect if someone is doing this? Any idea if it'll work on ethereum?

>Is there any way to detect if someone is doing this?

hope so

>Any idea if it'll work on ethereum?

hope not

this one might be bad

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